The purpose of this report is to analyze greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the Bay Area. For this study, Atherton (zip-code 94027) will be focused on between the years of 2013 and 2019. Atherton is an incorporated town in San Mateo County, and is best known for being an affluent community, often being the most expensive zip-code in the US. For this reason, it is expected that many of the emissions will be a result of residential activities. However, it will be interesting to see how much of these emissions are commercial versus residential, and how the split differs between vehicle and building emissions.
The basis of this analysis is the LODES dataset – that is, a set of origin-destination employment statistics. This data set only accounts for commute-based trips, so this study will assume that work-related trips make up the majority of emissions.
The census-blocks within the Atherton zip-code can be seen below.
Another key assumption for this study is that all inter-zipcode trips are zero. This was done as a means of minimizing the amount of mapbox trip routing that had to be completed. As seen below, very few of the trips in Atherton are inter-zipcode, and these trips are very small relative to all incoming/outgoing work trips.
## [1] "Percent of Trips That are Inter-zipcode: 2%"
The plot below shows all the origins of the trips to Atherton between 2013 and 2019. One key assumption for this map is that it only includes trips that occured by more than one person. This was done for clarity as the map was difficult to follow with every trip represented.
Next, the trip routing was completed using the MapBoxAPI to determine the distance of each inbound trip to, and outbound trip from Atheron. An RDS file was used to split the routing among group members. Due to the relatively small number of trips to and from Atherton, no additional data simplifying was necessary at the block-group or tract level.
A map of all the outbound trip routes can be seen below: